Transatlantic Dialogues, Morocco Today: Reading and Comment

Why does Clara Riveros in her book - Transatlantic Dialogues, Morocco Today - give an emphatic priority to the issue of gender, a priority that is evident in the information she provides, in the interviews and in all her analysis?  

One explanation could be Clara's subjective interest, but I rule it out, I don't think it's enough; another could be based on the relative, factual importance of the gender issue in current Saharan society. None of these explanations seems satisfactory to me.  

To propose a third, I will begin by developing what I understand to be its context. Thinking about the processes of social change, of modernisation, in the framework of which (as Clara well emphasises) modernity may or may not flourish. The great problem of the actors of change (institutional/social/economic) on the periphery of the capitalist system is from where they constitute themselves as agents of change. Let us remember that this dimension of the question is prior to the historical consolidation of capitalism and the political regimes that accompanied it, there is for example Barrington Moore's well-earned book on the state and social revolutions.  

Looking at things from this angle, the modernisation of the region clearly seems to be establishing itself from outside and from above, with practically no social forces to contribute their initiative or support to change and, therefore, to influence its direction and direction.  

This, theoretically, may explain what Clara insists on: modernisation without modernity. Modernisation is injected from above and from outside (economic, for example, or institutional, stipulating a constitutional framework), but without genuine actors who, from society, are capable of assuming and driving changes, instituting new values, and giving density to new practices and behaviours, modernity does not advance. 

It is within this framework that Clara's emphasis on gender makes sense to me. Although I don't think she says so, it is clear that she considers, and with good reason, that Saharawi women are where the greatest potential for genuine change from below is to be found in the region; that it is possible, for example - barely - that they are the ones who can make the law take root beyond the letter, that the rule of law and enforcement exist more firmly, or that their pressure is capable of generating links that challenge tribal restrictions on the movement of inhabitants.

In any case, I believe that this issue is central: in the region the progress of a change towards greater modernity does not yet rest on clearly visible actors but on potential and virtuality, and these are, it seems, on the side of women.  

Of course, this poses a very complex political grammar, both vertical (the actors of the State from the Moroccan top) and horizontal (the tensions experienced by women themselves, the cracks in terms of gender) and local power relations, the weight of tribes and families, micro and macro areas of any effort.  

Women will have to make decisions and choices, and it is not easy to see what their steps are, or could be, in terms of collective action.  

Because that is another issue: collective action seems to be completely absent for now.  

While tribes are powerful and well organised, and families still have a lot of power to structure daily life, women are atomised and the most dynamic ones choose to "study abroad".  

The question, therefore, "What is Morocco doing to advance in the construction of citizenship and civil society in the southern provinces", is an excellent question because it identifies the problem that has no clear or easy answer yet, starting with the fact that, in the context of Clara's analysis, Morocco is nothing more than a metaphor.  

What has been done is a kind of transaction, a large-scale negotiation that is typical of peripheral modernisations: resources (material, technological) were transferred by buying the immobility of the tribes and probably their political support. This, of course, conditions the results in terms of modernity.  

And it is not a linear process, which has a starting point and a destination and between one thing and the other there is simply time. Such complex processes of change are like a bridge crossing between two shores, in which it is the bridge, the particularities and peculiarities of the bridge, that gives shape to the new shore.  

Vicente Palermo is an Argentinean writer, sociologist and political scientist